


flammable undiagrammable sentiments

by Anonymous



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 21:07:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13466556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "I simply had a very unpleasant dream that I was in aWizard of Ozhomage," he said.  "And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, and you were there and actually wearing a blue gingham dress, only you had a blouse and red shoes too."Tahani shuddered.  "How ghastly."Spoilers throughRhonda, Diana, Jake and Trent.





	flammable undiagrammable sentiments

Michael woke up on the couch outside his office. The words EVERYTHING IS FINE confronted him.

Maybe this was what the real Good Place was like. The last thing you remembered was excruciating pain and then you woke up to something assuring you that everything was fine. And would continue to be fine.

Then again, he'd heard from Birdie in Bad Janet Quality Control that the Good Place was never intended for primates and they'd only started letting humans in to make the dogs happy, so they probably didn't need a sign. There was probably some revolting baby mammal to greet you, squeaking its joy and slobbering all over you.

This was apparently the sort of thing humans liked. The depths of their depravity were unfathomable.

"Michael," said Tahani to one side of him. "Thank goodness, you were making such awful shrieks. Like poor Shia's demo tape, only more rhythmically."

She had to help him up. It was embarrassing, especially when she started going, "Left, right, left, right," but at least it stopped him from telling her about the nightmare. It gave him time to process it as the rest of the humans came swarming into his office like the twelfth plague.

"You're all right!" exclaimed Chidi. He handed Michael a copy of Kant's _False Subtlety_. Michael sunk his teeth into it, chewed, and swallowed. It tasted of sawdust and human misery. Marvelous. Whatever else Michael might have said about Chidi, he had impeccable taste in philosophers.

Eleanor brought him a tall cold glass of what he was, knowing Eleanor, reasonably sure was vodka, and a hug. A hug! He didn't even mind her gross human smells or her obnoxious human heartbeat. He could have cried into her disgusting human hair. 

"You okay there, big guy?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," said Michael, taking off his glasses so he could wipe his eyes with his tie.

"Yo, dude, are you crying?" asked Jason. "Because it's okay to cry when bad things happen. Like when a swan attacks you when you were only trying to share some molly with it."

"What?"

"Swans are jerks," said Jason, shrugging.

"There were no swans involved. I simply had a very unpleasant dream that I was in a _Wizard of Oz_ homage," he said. "And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, and you were there and actually wearing a blue gingham dress, only you had a blouse and red shoes too."

Tahani shuddered. "How ghastly." 

"Hey, was I the Tin Man?" asked Jason. "All that silver looks dope, like he huffed a ton of paint."

Michael looked at him. "No, Jason. You were the Scarecrow."

"I got to scare crows? They're bigger jerks than swans. Like this one time a couple of crows stole my Molotov cocktail and firebombed a Chick-Fil-A and I had to go to prison for it. No one would believe they were smarter than me."

Who ever had said that Jason had never done any good in his life? He was forever gifting the world with lines like that. And he was so simple and easy to please. Chidi would have doubtless agonized over which character he'd been, and Eleanor would have mocked him for it to avoid having a breakdown over what which character _she'd_ been assigned said about her. "Well, you had your revenge in my dream," he said. "Vicky, of course, was the Wicked Witch of the West, and we had no idea if we would ever make it to the wizard, or if he could help. And the yellow brick road was actually a river of molten fire that came up to our armpits."

"I'm sorry, but whose armpits?"

"Everyone's."

"But mine are so much higher than, say," Tahani was going to say 'Eleanor's', he knew it, "Eleanor's."

She was so elegantly awful. Michael patted her shoulder proudly. "It was a dream, Tahani. We wouldn't have been physically able to walk in a river of fire no matter how high it was, although I would like to thank you for carrying my basket over your head like that."

"You're quite welcome. Anna Wintour always said I needed to show my arms off more."

"And Janet--"

"Hi there," said Janet, popping into his office.

"You were the good witch. With red hair and a white dress and everything." He shuddered. "I hate homages. In principle and because the word itself sounds like homard, which is French for lobster, which is not only French but also I can't believe people eat _lobsters_." How could humans look into those little beady black eyes on their fragile eyestalks and watch those perfectly expressive claws writhe in distress? How could they drop such poor helpless creatures into boiling water? It made his stomach queasy even thinking about it, and a bit of undergraduate term paper-flavored bile rose in his throat. "But it was all just a dream."

Janet patted his hand. "No, silly billy. This is the dream. You're still being tortured."

Michael stared at her. "Oh. So everything is... not fine?"

"Not yet," said Janet. 

"It's okay, chief," said Eleanor. "We'd never leave a man behind."

"Demon."

"Same difference," said Jason, and the room around him, and all five of them, faded.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a billion things I should be doing instead of this, but I just watched 211 and Michael. :(
> 
> "This is the dream, you're still [blank]" is itself a homage to Monty Python's The Cycling Tour. The Florida Swan incident has happened, and no one can prove the Florida crows one hasn't.


End file.
